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Boredom and cables

Posted by KanedaK (A) on March 29, 2020 at 23:34:47

Trying to spend the time (I'm getting slightly bored of cooking all day long and I'm beginning to get fat) I started looking at my "hi-fi treasures box" which is a bunch of cables and accessories I gathered here and there - some were given by a friend, some I received with equipment; most of the speaker cable is wayyyy too short to be used in my system (not to mention I'm bi-amping) except some terminated Naim NAC A5 which unfortunately uses bananas (my speakers only accept bare wire).

Disappointed of not being able to at least try anything from there, I decided to make a just-long-enough piece of speaker cable with some CAT5 cable I had lying around, and quickly connected one channel of the high-pass amp (400Hz to 20KHz). Interestingly, what was coming out of the mid and high drivers on that channel sounded significantly different from what was coming out from the channel with my usual cable (cheap and cheerful QED "original"); more crisp and detailed? assessing if it really is listenable would need full lengths on both channels of course, but considering all the time I have these days, and the cheap price of cAT5 cables, I might give it a try, just for fun; has anyone here pursued that direction?

Lastly, as I was still bored, I decided to try some Leedh cable from the 1990's. A friend of mine brought me his Leedh Nazca speakers and Marantz PM16 amplifier for me to have them fixed, and full Leedh speaker cabling (they are tri-wired!)
The Leedh cable is interesting: solid core copper in a star-quad configuration, two twisted cores for both + and _ on the mid and treble cables, 4 twisted cores per conductor on the bass cables. It is very rigid, horrible to manage, looks messy as hell, but is neatly terminated on one end with soldered hollow banana plugs, and on the other end is bare wire.

I expected that the Leedh cable would give very different results than the QED, and it did! But in my system, I didn't like it. It is fast, and seems more dynamic at first, but after a little while it's obvious that it is in fact rather dry and uninvolving, with a much reduced ambiance and a flat image. I was at the same time disappointed - because I really wanted to like them - and relieved - because they're not mine and I will have to give them back someday, and you can't buy it anymore as far as I know.

So I quickly put the QED back, which gives me consistently satisfying sound - but it all made me curious about other options to try. I'm specially curious about:

47Labs Stratos
DNM Reason
Nordost Flatline
WE "NOS" cable
...and various DIY cables made with CAT5 and other stuff.

Also, some Mogami cables might be worth experimenting with?

It may all look like I had some kind of late epiphany, but no, I've been a cable believer for years but, the QED having great synergy with my system (possibly taking out some rough edge here and there from my good-but-not-high-end electronics) and the need for long lengths (+ bi-amping) have stopped me from playing with different speaker cables and until now I mainly focused on interconnects.

Any suggestions of cables that are cheap but excellent in a horn system, or DIY recipes that work, are welcome in these troubled times :)

Be safe everyone.

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